Afterword
Status & Prospects
Bob Nelson’s story speaks for itself. No need to gild the lily, so I’ll just add a few notes from my perspective.
3* Ettinger wrote this epilogue in 2008 before he died and was suspended.
Life is stranger than art, but not as neat. Good guys usually have a few warts, and bad guys are sometimes kind to their dogs. Smart people can do dumb things, and banal people occasionally show common sense. But both brilliance and common sense will have a struggle against habits ingrained over thousands of generations.
How to cut the chains of tradition? It can be done in minutes, acetylene torch style, by the white-hot passion of a Bob Nelson, but this is rare indeed. It can also be done file-style, sawing away patiently. Or if we change the metaphor to that of a dungeon prisoner, he might dig his way out with a spoon, working year after year—in other words, you can slowly build your information and determination.
In 1962 I published the first version of The Prospect of Immortality; the first commercial edition was published in 1964. Since then, no one has managed to live forever.
In 1972 the first edition of my Man into Superman was published. Since then, no one has leaped any tall buildings.
Still, there has been progress. It has been much less rapid than I originally hoped, and the cryonics movement remains very small, with only around a thousand people actively involved and only around 170 patients in frozen storage, or cryostasis, as of the beginning of 2008. Even the broader “immortalist” movement remains small; few acknowledge, even to themselves, that the total elimination of death might not be a bad thing and that the possibility should be investigated.
But the still broader “life extension” movement is going great guns, with many millions of people trying to improve their lifestyles and buying dietary supplements touted as life-extending. Billions of dollars are being spent on the development of nanotechnology, or molecular engineering, the potential of which includes submicroscopic robots to maintain and repair the human body from the inside. Every year, almost every day, advances in science and technology make our thesis more credible.
There are also solid indications of an acceleration of progress, one example being that the Cryonics Institute, started in 1976, froze its first patient (my mother) in 1977 but has received more than half of its current eighty-five patients in the past five years. Membership has more than tripled in the last seven years. The wind is at our backs, even if it is still just a light breeze.
Perhaps I should not have been surprised at the slow growth. After all, one could regard the cryonics/immortalist movement as the most radical revolution in human history, with a perceivable threat to many of the habits and institutions that people hold dear. Perhaps the real surprise is that it has taken root and grown, and no one has even been lynched. (Cryonics has been effectively outlawed in a few places, such as France and the Canadian province of British Columbia, but in the United States the opposition has been mostly just a few grumbles. And there are countries, such as Australia, where interest per capita is higher than in the United States.)
As for interest in trans-humanity—forget it, for now. Oh, there is plenty of intellectual interest or fantasizing, and there has been for a long time. Science fiction is around a hundred years old as a popular genre, and many of the biggest movie hits of recent decades have been of this sort. Science fiction is now a major part of the entertainment scene. But fictional supermen have very rarely shown any genuine superiority worth mentioning, for the simple reason that readers would not relate to them and writing about them would be too difficult, if possible at all.
In fact, very few people want radical change of any kind. They want their idealized future to be just like the present, except gold-plated or chocolate-covered. Or we could say they want the present without warts—nothing much different except more money and less suffering, along with continued life. And it’s hard to quarrel with that.
The future is almost certain to be rowdier than we would like, and the surprises will not all be pleasant. Some of the heavy thinkers believe that within the next fifty years, or even sooner, accelerating scientific advances will bring the “spike” or “singularity”—a sudden surge of change (including intelligent machines and self-reproducing factories) that will compress centuries of change into years. That is downright frightening. But playing ostrich won’t help, and if there is much to worry about, there is probably more to hope for.
What Kind of People Are Involved in Cryonics?
It is mildly interesting to glance at the record for clues as to what kind of people are attracted to—or repelled by—the concepts of cryonics and immortalism, or life extension. There are some surprises.
Early on, some of the professional chatterers warned that the cryonics “scam” would seduce countless of the desperate aged to throw their money at the body-freezers. That never happened, and would not have happened even if we had been ambulance chasers and even if we were in it for the money, which is verifiably not the case.
Old people naturally dominate our patient rolls, but the aged are not our best potential recruits by any means. They seldom have any strong fear of death or any strong will to live, or much ability to think outside the box or deviate from the ordinary. Typically, all they want is surcease or respite. They descend passively into oblivion.
Their children, or in some cases their spouses, may take a different view. The majority of members of the cryonics organizations are men, but the majority of patients are women. They are the mothers and wives who were held especially dear, and given their chance. Next most frequent patients are fathers and husbands.
What about occupation?
Cryonicists cover a broad spectrum, with clearly a concentration of the better educated. For example, we like to say that “doctors choose cryonics, nine to one.”
That doesn’t mean 90 percent of physicians are in cryonics. The absolute numbers are small in every segment of the population. But we do have about nine times as many physicians in cryonics as you would expect on the basis of population. In other words, a doctor is about nine times as likely to be involved in cryonics as a person chosen at random from the population. If we look at PhDs, the numbers are even more striking.
Computer professionals are even more highly overrepresented, and we have a theory about that. Computer people not only depend on logic on a day-to-day basis but are also accustomed to seeing rapid advances in what is possible.
One cannot say the same thing about any other profession. Lawyers use logic, but the law changes very slowly, and judges and juries may disregard logic. Medicine involves logic, but a lot of it is guesswork, and clinical proof of effectiveness and FDA approval come very slowly. Engineers use logic, but much of what they do requires lots of capital, and again change is slow. The computer field is unique in its total reliance on logic and the ease and rapidity of improvements—and that, we think, makes computer people unusually open to our thesis.
Personality? There hasn’t been any scientific survey, but we do know for example that Libertarians are overrepresented in cryonics. The main characteristic of Libertarians is independence and love of freedom, with distrust of authority. Many of them are entrepreneurs, self-employed. I don’t endorse the Libertarian political party, but they are interesting people and less likely than most to be chained to old habits.
The bottom line of course is that the “typical” cryonicist profile really doesn’t matter. The one thing that matters is whether you and your family will survive and thrive. At present, a majority [of people] are skeptical of cryonics—so will you let that majority vote you into the grave?
Heroes and Zeroes
Many people are people-people, responding better to human-interest stories than to dry logic. So let me relate a few of our stories, or at least their brief versions. The “zeroes” are of two sorts: those who are moldering and those who look like long shots but still have a chance. The “heroes” are also of two sorts: those who tried and failed and those who tried and have a chance. I won’t specify in advance which is which.
Walt Disney
According to the gossip, Walt had heard about cryonics and expressed his desire to be frozen at death. According to the persistent rumor, he actually was frozen, privately, and is hidden away somewhere. My tentative conclusion is that he did express such a wish but took no concrete steps to assure it, and when he died, he lost a lot of influence. His family thought his wishes were less important than their business, and they buried him—a grave mistake from his point of view, and ours. At any rate, there is a grave in a California cemetery with a Walt Disney marker on it.
So Mickey Mouse is immortal, in his fashion, but his daddy is probably just dead.
Andrea Foote
Dr. Foote was a psychologist on the faculty of the University of Michigan and served on the board of directors of the Cryonics Institute for many years. When she was dying of cancer, arrangements were made to keep her at home under hospice care, with family members (who cooperated with her wishes) in attendance and Cryonics Institute equipment in place. We were prepared; she was promptly perfused and frozen and is now at the Cryonics Institute facility in Clinton Township, Michigan, northeast of Detroit. She left CI a bequest of more than one hundred thousand dollars.
Note: No director or officer of the Cryonics Institute is paid a penny or derives any financial benefit from its operations. There are no stockholders. It is a nonprofit organization run by the members for the benefit of the patients. CI received the bulk of Professor Ettinger’s estate after his clinical death and he was frozen.
We have nothing against capitalism and expect and hope that the likes of General Electric, Frigidaire, etc., may eventually enter the field. But we need to squelch the suspicion that CI or its directors are in it for the money. We are in it for something more valuable—to save our lives and those of the people we love.
Richard Jones
Professional name Dick Clair, he was a TV writer and producer, especially for The Carol Burnett Show. He was signed up at various times with three different cryonics organizations, the last being Alcor, where he is currently safely stored. He left his estate to Alcor, but the inevitable litigation by heirs resulted in a split settlement. Alcor did, however, receive a substantial bequest, I think over a million dollars. This was Alcor’s chief asset for years. Definitely a hero.
Stanley Kubrick
The famous director of Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and many other films saw me on one of the TV shows—I think it was Tonight with Johnny Carson—bought dozens of copies of my book The Prospect of Immortality, and invited me to New York to meet some of his rich friends. Unfortunately, he also invited a scientist/businessman named Ben Schloss, who apparently conned him out of some money and thereby soured his interest.
Peter Sellers
The actor (Pink Panther, Being There, Dr. Strangelove, etc.) had a flash of interest and wrote me a warm letter, but he had a short attention span and of course many other interests competing for his attention. He ended in a grave or crematory, I don’t know which.
Don Laughlin
Possibly the flashiest of current living cryonics members is the man with a city named for him—Laughlin, Nevada, a kind of junior Las Vegas centered around his casino resort. Laughlin is a billionaire, or half anyway, so who says rich people can’t be smart? And don’t say he’s a gambler, because his habits couldn’t be more different from those of his customers. He only places bets when the odds are in his favor. Does that tell you something?
K. Eric Drexler
Dr. Drexler is a shaker and mover in the massive scientific drive loosely called nanotechnology, or molecular engineering. Very roughly speaking, this means building things by moving individual atoms, one at a time. Drexler’s first book, Engines of Creation, was published about the same time, 1986, that two IBM scientists built the first scanning tunneling microscope, which could “see” and even manipulate individual atoms. Drexler foresees computer-driven machines (assemblers), which will be able to build almost anything—including copies of themselves!—out of almost any raw material, such as air, water, or dirt, using any available energy, such as sunlight.
Such devices already exist in nature of course. They are called plants. But those prospectively designed and built by humans will be much more versatile. Remember the movie Fantastic Voyage with Raquel Welch, where a submarine carrying doctors was miniaturized and injected into the bloodstream of a patient to carry out repairs? That was silly—wasn’t it? Yes, but it isn’t silly to envision ultraminiaturized robots—nanobots—that could do the same thing. They could also repair the damage done by freezing a cryonics patient.
Yes, one of our greatest heroes, Dr. Drexler is a cryonicist.
Richard Feynman
Professor Feynman won a Nobel prize in physics for contributions to quantum theory, the forefront of physics. In 1958 he gave a lecture, “Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” explaining his opinion that no known law prevented our learning how to manipulate atoms individually, with the implication that we could design and build—and repair!—physical systems of any complexity (such as you). This came to the attention of a young student, K. Eric Drexler, who proceeded to do something about it, as already noted.
Dr. Feynman saw the promised land, however dimly; but, like Moses, he didn’t get there. Perhaps due to cultural inertia, he did nothing about cryonics and died a few years ago. A partial hero.
Vitrification Progress
A great many people who ought to know better—including not only physicians but even professional cryobiologists, “experts” in low temperature biology—have said that freezing ruptures cells because water expands when it freezes, and the idea of repairing all the billions of ruptured cells in a human body is preposterous.
The fact is, first, that animal cell walls are elastic, and the expansion of water when it freezes is only about 10 percent, which could mostly be accommodated. More importantly, however, it just isn’t true that cells burst when a large specimen (such as a person) is frozen slowly (the only possible kind of freezing for large specimens, barring methods involving high pressure). Instead water is withdrawn from the cells and freezes in the intercellular spaces, so the cells, far from bursting, actually shrink.
That doesn’t mean freezing is harmless. There can still be mechanical damage by ice crystals tearing cell walls, for example. There will also be chemical damage, because when water is withdrawn from cells, the remaining solution becomes hypertonic, with solutes too concentrated, and proteins may become denatured, etc.
But we mustn’t overdo the pessimism. Despite the difficulties, a great many biological specimens have in fact been completely frozen, stored at liquid nitrogen temperature, and then revived. These include not only microscopic forms of life, and a few insects, but also a few adult mammalian organs, such as the rat ovary and rat parathyroid. There have also been many partial successes, such as recovery of hamsters to normal behavior after half the water in their brains had been changed to ice. Microscopic and other studies show that our procedures greatly reduce the damage that would otherwise occur. (There is much more detail on the CI website: www.cryonics.org.)
But even though freezing leaves realistic hope, it would still be better if we could avoid ice formation. And there is indeed such a thing as solidification by cold without ice formation. It is called vitrification, which means formation of a glass-like condition.
Glasses, and similar substances such as tars, which are liquid when hot, can cool and become apparently solid, yet not form the crystals typical of solids. Instead they retain the ability to flow, very slowly. Over periods of many years, glass windowpanes may observably settle, becoming slightly thicker at the bottom.
Certain water solutions can also vitrify under appropriate conditions. When Dr. Yuri Pichugin was director of research at the Cryonics Institute, he developed new and improved vitrification solutions and procedures, which are undergoing continued and extended tests. We do not foresee that, anytime soon, procedures will be so highly perfected that a healthy person could be vitrified and immediately revived—let alone someone who has died of old age or disease or trauma, or someone who suffered a long delay between death and cryopreservation. But hope continues, and grows.
The bottom line is the same. For the first time in human history, there is a realistic chance of rescue of so-called “dead” people. How good that chance may be, and how much you value it, are questions for you to decide.